Industrial relations: working for nothing

On Mayday 1920 Lenin made a show of clearing rubble with his own hands, and asked his compatriots to give a days's labour for free - it was the first so-called all-Russian Subbotnik. It was a tough sell, but at least the great revolutionary could claim, however dubiously, that unpaid effort was needed to create a completely new order in which the life of workers would be transformed. Staff of the financially stricken British Airways are now being invited to volunteer to work a whole month unpaid; for them, however, there is no utopia in prospect. Their only inspiration is the hope of holding on to their current jobs, and the example of chief executive, Willie Walsh, who is to hand back his £61,000 pay cheque for July.

That monthly figure is, according to Civil Aviation Authority figures, more than twice what BA cabin crew typically pick up over the course of an entire year; and for others, such as baggage handlers, the salary multiple is even bigger. The most obvious relevance of this is practical - most of those on the wrong side of the pay gap are simply not in a position where it is feasible follow Mr Walsh's lead. Whenever shared sacrifice is called for, though, inequality matters in more intangible ways as well.

In the second world war, with the survival of a nation rather than a mere company at stake, rationing was deemed necessary to prevent the rich from paying their way out of their share of the pain. More generally, where ever pay has been controlled for the national good, wage bargains have tended to prioritise the poor - in Germany, in Scandinavia and, less sustainably, in 1970s Britain. The prospects for salvation-through-sacrifice schemes such as that at BA are unavoidably coloured by trends in who gets what. And wages have been squeezed as a share of the economy since the 1970s, while at the same time the UK witnessed as sharp a rise in pay inequality as any significant country.

If all firms started paying their staff for less of their time, a deflationary spiral would be the result, something which would endanger the little life that remains in the economy. But for many individual companies - including BA, which posted a loss of £401m last month - trimming pay and hours may be the only alternative to simply sacking staff. Workers will, quite reasonably, rail at any talk of giving their services for free, but part-time working and unpaid leave - two of the other voluntary options being put to BA staff - are in truth less brutal ways to share the pain than punishing a luckless minority with outright unemployment.

The rational response to economic pain must involve sharing it out. But the strained social fabric of unequal Britain makes effective collective sacrifice particularly hard to pull off.